Carolyn Holdsworth, a home-schooling mother of five, picked up the phone to hear a robocaller on the other end about 3 p.m. Tuesday.

Thinking it was a sales pitch, she hung up.

A couple of hours later, she and her husband Brian grew concerned when they saw social media posts saying their home-schooling association — which enrols a third of Alberta’s home-schooled students — had been shut down by the provincial government.

“We weren’t sure if this was real,” Brian Holdsworth said Wednesday.

The St. Albert couple called staff at Wisdom Home Schooling Society, who told them they didn’t know what was going on.

The phone call the Holdsworths missed was to tell them they needed to enrol their children elsewhere. Students who attend the Cold Lake bricks-and-mortar school were handed letters on their way out of class.

Around 7 p.m., the phone rang again. This call patched them into a telephone town hall with 900 other parents, where Eggen and officials from Alberta Education took questions from families affected by the sudden closure.

The way the government went about informing thousands of parents left Holdsworth suspicious. If allegations of financial mismanagement are true, why has the school been allowed to operate as is for 20 years, he asked. Why not wait until a legal finding of wrongdoing before pulling the plug?

“It’s astonishing. Can you imagine if a public school board were shut down because the school board was not writing off their expenses properly? In the middle of a semester, can you imagine if Edmonton Public was just shut down? That would be unbelievable,” Holdsworth said.

Alberta Education has reported its findings to both the RCMP and the Canada Revenue Agency.

Stony Plain mom Heather Duperron also felt angry, but her frustration is directed at Trinity Christian and Wisdom.

“My very first reaction was shock, but I’m ticked off mostly for the irresponsible nature of how they were mishandling funds. I do think private schools need to be accountable to taxpayers and to government. So I was rather disappointed to see that they’re not.”

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Duperron home schools her three children, ages 10, 8 and 6, and knows the process of hunting for a new home-school organization all too well. Three years ago, the association where her children were registered went bankrupt, and she had to scramble to find a new board.

This fall, she enrolled her children with Trinity Christian, ironically, because she knew it was a large organization and thought it would be more stable. Things were going swimmingly until Tuesday, she said.

“This has really left us in a pickle. It did feel like a bit of a sucker punch coming from the government saying, ‘You don’t have a school any more.’ “

She wondered why Trinity Christian was accepting new registrations for this fall when administrators knew the association was under government review.

The challenge will be finding another association that supports the “traditional” model of home-schooling she favours, which allows parents to choose lessons from different curricula that are of most interest to their children. Her eight-year-old is doing Grade 5 work and her two older children are enrolled in an online genetics course they love that’s intended for Grade 9 students.

The government gave parents a list of 45 public and private school authorities across the province that support home schoolers. Duperron called a few of them Wednesday and heard they were getting many inquiries from parents.

The Holdsworths, who chose home-schooling for the freedom and lifestyle it affords the family, aren’t among those yet searching for a spot. They want to wait and see how Trinity Christian and Wisdom will respond, including watching for a potential legal challenge of the decision.

Brian Holdsworth said he knows the family that runs Wisdom. He struggled to understand the accusations.

“These are really, really, morally upstanding, good-willed people. This is why we give them the benefit of the doubt.”

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